Camus - The Plague
After a year of navigating all the changes coming from COVID-19, I thought it fitting to visit existential writer Albert Camus’ (1913-1960) take on facing the reality of disease in his 1947 novel The Plague.
The fictional story of the novel takes place in the real-life Algerian city of Oran some time in the 1940s, and follows the city’s reaction to an outbreak of the bubonic plague according to the account of a narrator trying to give his best objective version of what happened.
As I started reading the novel, I was first struck by how familiar so much of it felt, despite being written in the first half of the last century. People in the town struggle to understand what all the numbers about the spread and mortality of the disease really indicate, and how seriously to take it all. Officials struggle with just how drastic the action taken should be. Some people respond to new restrictions by complaining that they are too heavy handed. Generally, shopping and entertainment become really popular because there’s not much else to do.
All this sounds so much like this past year of adjusting to COVID-19 and the changes it has brought about. To zoom out even further, Camus was likely inspired by earlier accounts of real-life outbreaks, leaving me with the impression that there are some very common ways we as people tend to respond to these kinds of large-scale, irrational, out-of-our-control events.
And really that’s what Camus’ novel seems to be about. The plague in the story is really just a stand-in for any kind of irrational force in life that we struggle to make sense of, but that is connected to our mortality. The novel’s plague can symbolize disease in general, violence in general, authoritarianism (in direct reference to Nazism), or any other example pointing to the Absurd, the gap between our desire for understanding and the world’s refusal to provide that understanding to us.
The main characters of the novel provide us with examples of various reactions to the Absurd in life, through how they react to the plague specifically.
The doctor Rieux focuses only on healing and health above all else, not really interested in making meaning of the whole thing but simply helping people in the midst of it.
Visitor to the town Tarrou connects the plague directly to a different kind of “plague” he sees in society: the presence of violence, and tries to find a way to live morally despite it.
Journalist Rambert initially focuses on his own individual happiness and wants to escape the city to return to his wife in Paris, but changes his mind and decides to stay and volunteer to help for the sake of the good of others.
Civil servant Grand has become obsessed with the first line of a book he is writing, and throughout the novel keeps trying to find the exact right words for that one sentence, despite how arbitrary and ridiculous this obsession with detail seems in the scheme of things.
Cottard, neighbor to Grand, revels in the chaos of the plague as it takes attention away from an unnamed past crime he has committed, but struggles increasingly as things get better with the plague clearing up.
Jesuit priest Paneloux initially preaches of the sins of the city and how the plague is punishment for these sins. But after witnessing the suffering the plague brings to people up close, he alters his take away from a logical one of blame to a non-logical leap of faith in the will of God that he can’t understand.
The novel as a whole seems to be asking a question that is relevant to all of us: how do we react to the Absurd?
What do we focus on when faced with a reality we can’t understand or control? Do we focus on practical action, morality, personal happiness, artistic expression, relief from control, religious explanation, or something else?
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